Fatah Commander Mohammad Dahlan to Hamas: Don’t Recognize Israel’s Right to Exist

“They say that Fatah has asked them to recognize Israel’s right to exist and this is a big deception. For the one thousandth time, I want to reaffirm that we are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Rather, we are asking Hamas not to do so because Fatah never recognized Israel’s right to exist,”said Fatah commander Mohammad Dahlan to the Palestinian Authority’s official TV station Palestine TV. This will surely come as a surprise to American, Israeli and European officials who supported Fatah over Hamas based on the false assumption that Fatah is a moderate group that seeks peace with Israel. It’ll also come as a surprise to the mainstream media, which took the claim that Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah is a peace-loving moderate entity as fact.

When it came to allegations of Fatah having Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist as a condition for a “unity government,” Dahlan called those allegations “misleading” and said that Hamas was putting “words in their mouth.”

In February 2007, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah agreed to a unity government with Hamas even though Hamas still didn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist [even today, Hamas still does not recognize Israel's right to exist and has no plan to actually to it] until June 2007 when Hamas took complete control of Gaza. Israel, the US and the EU backed Fatah over Hamas again based on the assumption that Fatah, unlike Hamas, actually seeks peace with Israel. The EU, US and Israel called on Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist, end terrorism and honor previous agreements [the third of which is the basis for the land for peace principle in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] as preconditions for negotiations with and an end to the boycott against the Hamas government. They’re also the preconditions for recognition of the Hamas government. Hamas said no to all three of the preconditions, continued their terrorist campaign against Israel and continued to spew their radical Islamist ideology, which includes anti-Semitism, to the arab and Muslim world including to the Palestinian people.

In that interview, Dahlan also said,”I want to point out that the Palestinian Authority under Abu Ammar [pseudonym for Arafat] targeted collaborators 10 times more than Hamas. We put many of them on trial and executed many others. But we did this in accordance with the law and not the Hamas way.”

 In other words, Dahlan bragged that Arafat killed more Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel than Hamas did. Palestinians suspected of collaborated with Israel were barbarically lynched by Hamas, Fatah and other Palestinian terrorist groups including Palestinian Islamic Jihad [PIJ].

Even while Fatah continues to convince the international community that they seek peace with Israel, this was not the first time a Fatah official admitted that Fatah doesn’t actually recognize Israel’s right to exist. Abu Ahmad also admitted that Fatah doesn’t actually recognize Israel, calling Fatah’s “recognition” of Israel a “political calculation.”

Fatah’s widespread propaganda in their controlled territories also call for Israel’s destruction and call for terrorism on Israel, even portraying suicide bombers as holy Islamic warriors fighting to “free” Palestine from the Jewish infidels. This was the theme that was [and is] prominent in Fatah-controlled media and textbooks. Three years after the signing of the Oslo accords and the famous handshake between then PLO leader Yasser Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat, in front of a Stockholm audience, admitted that “we plan to eliminate Israel.” In 2001, the PA’s minister of Jerusalem Affairs Faisal Husseini, shortly before his death, told Al-Arabi, an Egyptian newspaper, that the Oslo accords was a trojan horse to eventually eliminate Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas calls for the right of return in order to demographically destroy Israel by turning Israel’s Jewish majority into a minority.

Though Fatah pays cheap lip service against terrorist acts committed against Israel, Fatah incites terrorism on Israel and commits some of the terrorist acts. In 2000, Arafat set up and commanded the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to be used as one of the wings of Fatah to commit their terrorist acts on Israel. Arafat ran the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade until his death. After arafat’s death, Mahmoud Abbas took over as leader of the Fatah movement which also meant being in control of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is really part of the Fatah movement, just there to commit the terrorist acts of Fatah while Fatah can pretend to be the peace-seeking moderate group it is not. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was added on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations [FTO] for their terrorist acts against Israel.

Mohammad Dahlan telling Hamas not to recognize Israel’s right to exist comes as another part of evidence against Israel and the west’s perception of Fatah as a peace-seeking moderate movement.